Something that I did not hear discussed at the time (and have not heard since) is the symbolism of the Russians sending their icebreaker RV Akademik Federov to assist RV Polarstern at the start of the 2019/20 MOSAiC sea ice drift campaign. They had newer & more powerful ships, so why pick Federov?

New blog post: "What would Thomas Kuhn think about me?" In it I consider incremental science, paradigm shifts, CryoSat-2 radar waves, and me. www.robbiemallett.com/researchblog...

Up close and personal with one of the Arctic's infamous boundary layer inversions!

Updating a figure with 2025 data for a research proposal. The shift in conditions around 2016 are becoming starker by the year...

As my PhD came to a close in 2022 I was lucky to join an icebreaker campaign in the Weddell Sea. TLDR: lots of very hard, very coarse snow. Rosie Willatt then led a very nice analysis of the radar data we collected, and it's out today in GRL. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Paper out today led by @aliduffey.bsky.social where we compare the atmospheric boundary layer in climate models to 7000 vertical profiles from Soviet ice stations + ~500 from the MOSAiC & SHEBA campaigns. More forays into the world of polar meteorology to come! dx.doi.org/10.1029/2024...

Fun to speak to the Blue Compass conference in Tromsø today about Arctic sea ice decline: it's strongly confined to shallow waters and exclusive economic zones, posing an immediate governance challenge.

Some new work out today on salt movement in snow covered sea ice, led by Anton Komarov at U Manitoba. Anton ran with the lab approach I used with Vishnu Nandan, but eliminated some of methodological uncertainties to produce much more compelling results. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

already in an early career catastrophe research role but thanks

Really happy to be one of two finalists for "Best popular article written by a scientist" this year at the ABSW awards. Particularly poignant to be considered for the Katharine Giles Award. I never met Katharine, but I was often steered by her legacy while working for @cpom-uk.bsky.social

Wrote about the myth of an empty, distant Arctic for @geographical.co.uk geographical.co.uk/news/the-arc...

Another blog post, this time about the recent ICARP IV Summit in Boulder, CO. I've written about the townhall meeting that I helped run with other co-chairs of Research Priority Team 2. www.robbiemallett.com/researchblog...

New blog post about my SCAR Fellowship experiment at the Churchill Marine Observatory. Oxygen isotope data now back from the lab, and all looking good! www.robbiemallett.com/researchblog...

Thirty years later (2022 vs 1992) I was in the same basket, in the same Weddell Sea, also looking at pancake ice. The more things change...

Short critique of my own work out today in J Glaciology. Five years ago I made a back-of-envelope calculation of seasonal densification rate of snow on sea ice. It unexpectedly became quite popular! Here I show it was roughly right even if the method was a bit dodgy... doi.org/10.1017/jog....

Can climate models reproduce observed trends? The answer can be challenging. Our new review paper in Science Advances led by Isla Simpson and Tiffany Shaw @drshaw.bsky.social discusses challenges and ways forward in confronting climate models and observations. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Inspired by @zacklabe.com to put my invited talk slides online. www.robbiemallett.com/presentations One thing you'll notice is that I'm fond of the animated GIF! A thread of my favourites, starting with not-graphs. [Divers surfacing from under Antarctic sea ice at Rothera]

Very sceptical that an ice floe could be 3m wide and 10m thick. Not least because it would float in a way that would make it 10m wide and 3m thick....

Exciting to see U Waterloo's CryoSAR on the Calgary airport runway last night. Side-looking Ku- and L-band radars mounted in a Cesna caravan. Sadly no passenger seats for today's flight over Fortress Mountain 😭

A real and sad loss for American climate science. Zack has inspired me since the beginning of my polar science journey. If I turn out to be half the scientist he is, I'll be happy. This move is disrespectful to him, but also to the public.

We successfully simulated a sea ice flooding event inside the Churchill Marine Observatory today! We sawed out our snow covered slab from the ice sheet and achieved a negative freeboard, taking a suite of geophysical & isotopic observations before and afterwards.

Excited to start my SCAR Fellowship adventure!

This week in "ideas I thought were new but actually aren't". In the final sentence of her 2005 PhD thesis, Katherine Giles stressed that it would be really neat to steer ICESat onto a CryoSat ground track. It took 15 years and a second iteration of both missions for Cryo2Ice to happen!

New blog post: Hyping the mission: the tensions between the public-facing comms of space agencies and scientists. www.robbiemallett.com/researchblog...

January 2025 was quite unexpectedly the warmest January on record at 1.75C above preindustrial, beating the prior record set in 2024. This is despite the presence of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific, with the El Niño event of 2023/2024 long faded. www.theclimatebrink....

Good day to be a snow scientist

IASC Newsletter now out! Congratulations to friend & colleague @aliduffey.bsky.social, who will be this year's Atmosphere fellow. Also well done to incoming Cryosphere Fellows Ellie Miller and Leena Leppänen - I look forward to passing the baton in Boulder! iasc.info/news/iasc-ne...

Good day snowshoeing today

Found out last week that my PhD project won the annual faculty prize for postgrad research. Couldn't have even handed it in without the support from supervisors Julienne Stroeve & @micheltsamados.bsky.social, many other mentors, friends, APECS and the ICCI, but most of all... @es-ucl.bsky.social

New paper out on satellite-based snow depth estimates. doi.org/10.1038/s415... As flattered as I am to have an equation named after me, I would have preferred the authors to have cited the paper in which I wrote this equation (rather than the URL of some random CCI report).

One of the main factors that makes me want to leave academia: Seeing senior colleagues who I respect list themselves as coauthor on papers that they don't believe in, and would probably reject as a reviewer or editor.

Snow acts a lot like a sponge, and soaks up salty brine where it's present. This helps salt move up from the sea ice into the snowpack itself. Here's a video from the lab experiments we did at Rothera research station in Antarctica.

The full paper looking at salt migration in snow on sea ice is out now! We dyed sea ice pink (with a lake ice control experiment), and showed salt moving upward into the snow. Why not just download & read now just to be safe? www.cambridge.org/core/journal...